1. FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a hard disk drive assembly.
2. DESCRIPTION OF RELATED ART
Hard disk drive assemblies contain one or more magnetic disk that are attached to a hub. The hub is coupled to an electric motor by a stationary spindle shaft. The motor rotates the disk relative to the shaft and an actuator arm. The actuator arm has a head which can magnetize and sense the magnetic fields of the disk, in accordance with a scheme to read and write binary information on the disk. The components of the hard disk assembly are typically enclosed by a cover that is attached to a baseplate.
There is a desire to construct hard disk assemblies in a pluggable card format which can be connected to a computer. Such a construction would allow the user to easily replace hard disk drives and the accompanying memory space in a manner similar to the present use of floppy disk. Continuous handling of a card-sized disk drive may result in the dropping or jarring of the disk assembly. Dropping the card assembly may exert excessive G forces on the disk drive. Such forces may damage the internal components of the drive unit. Additionally, excessive vibrational loading may cause unwanted tracking errors in the drive.
To increase the overall stiffness of the assembly, it is desirable to attach the spindle shaft to both the cover and the baseplate of the unit. Coupling the shaft to the cover and baseplate must be accomplished without necessitating costly tolerances on the piece-parts, or the creation of a gap between the baseplate and cover. It would therefore be desirable to provide a disk drive unit that is easy to assemble, absorbs shock loads and can couple the cover to the spindle shaft without requiring undesirable tolerances on the parts and assembly. It would also be desirable to couple the spindle shaft to the cover in a manner that dampens any vibrational load applied to the disk drive.